Consumers today are switching from film-based chemical photography to digital photography in increasing numbers. The instantaneous nature of image capture and review, the ease of use, numerous output and sharing options, multimedia capabilities, and on-line and digital media storage capabilities have all contributed to consumer acceptance of this technological advancement. A hard drive, on-line account, or a DVD can store thousands of images, which are readily available for printing, transmitting, conversion to another format, conversion to another media, or used to produce an image product. Since the popularity of digital photography is relatively new, the majority of images retained by a typical consumer usually takes the form of hardcopy media. These legacy images may span decades of time and have a great deal of personal and emotional importance to the collection's owner. In fact, these images often increase in value to their owners over time. Thus, even images that were once not deemed good enough for display are now cherished. These images are often stored in boxes, albums, frames, or even their original photofinishing return envelopes.
Getting a large collection of legacy images into a digital form is often a formidable task for a typical consumer. The user is required to sort through hundreds of physical prints and place them in some relevant order, such as chronology or sorting by event. Typically, events are contained on the same roll of film or across several rolls of film processed in the same relative time frame. After sorting the prints, the user would be required to scan the media to make a digital version of the image. Scanning hardcopy image media such as photographic prints to obtain a digital record is well known. Many solutions currently exist to perform this function and are available at retail from imaging kiosks and digital minilabs and at home with “all-in-one” scanner/printers or with personal computers equipped with media scanners. Some media scanning devices include media transport means, simplifying the task of scanning hardcopy media. Using any of these systems requires that the user spend time or expense converting the images into a digital form only to be left with the problem of providing some sort of organizational structure to the collection of digital files generated.
The prior art teaches sorting scanned hardcopy images by physical characteristics and also utilizing information/annotation from the front and back of the image. This teaching allows grouping images in a specific chronological sequence, which may be adequate for very large image collections. However, if the images are scanned and organized, but are not rotated correctly, they will be recorded to CD/DVD or some other suitable storage media in the wrong orientation. This results in a less than ideal experience for the end user.
Accordingly, if additional metadata can be acquired from an image, there are several improvements to the image that can be made. For example, in addition to organization, metadata indicating that an image is black-and-white vs. color can be used to correct the orientation of the image. Also, if we know where the border or the image is, the border or the image can be used to properly restore (reverse dye-fade) the image.
However, a system does not exist to rapidly convert large volumes of hardcopy media images into digital form and dynamically create a complete representation of the metadata of the image, which can then be used for organization, orientation, restoration, archiving, presentation, enhancing, etc. Such a system would provide a way for a consumer to easily and affordably obtain a digital version of a hardcopy image collection that will be a high quality presentation provided with a meaningful context. While some prior art techniques may provide some help in organizing images, there is still a need to provide further efficient techniques for automatically organizing images into further defined groupings.